The Vessel
by Inkspace
Summary: Concerned for Christine's deteriorating state, and hunted by the law himself, Raoul flees with her to the house in Perros. But as he struggles to come to terms with his ruined life and to save the woman he loves, he is visited by a specter of the past.


_Author's Note: This story came about as the result of a sudden flash of inspiration upon rereading Leroux. Though it is set after the events of the novel, it is as much about the characters' pasts as their future. Though experienced mostly through the eyes of Raoul, the story will heavily involve Christine, her father, Erik, Philippe, and Mama Valerius._

_I have attempted to remain as faithful to the original novel as this concept will allow. Where I have bent facts from the canon, I have attempted to merely play up or play down certain aspects, as opposed to outrightly contradicting them._

_If the pace seems a little slow at first, I beg you to continue reading, as adventure does lie ahead!_

_And if you read, please review! This is my first time back at writing after several years' sabbatical, so your feedback, encouragement, and constructive criticism are not only appreciated – they are treasured!_

_Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the story._

_-Eden (Inkspace)_

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The Vessel

_"Sometimes the angel came much later... No one ever saw him, but he made himself heard to those predestined to hear him. It often happened when they least expected it, when they were sad and disheartened. Then they suddenly heard heavenly harmonies and a divine voice, and they remembered it all their lives." – Gaston Leroux (Lowell Bair translation)_

Chapter One

Raoul closed his eyes and leaned back into the leather seat. The coach jostled its way over the stones and ruts of the country road, still unpatched from the rainy season. The movement was a jarring contrast to traveling the smooth cobblestoned streets of Paris, but the change was a welcome one. He could lay back and rest, not worrying who might follow them unseen in the night-time. No need to crack the door to spy on the empty road behind them.

He thought back to the weeks leading up to this journey. Too many nights waking soaked with sweat and trembling in terror, a pistol within easy reach at his bedside. Waiting for weeks that seemed interminable for that single sentence in _l'Epoque_ that would set them free.

Freedom. It was a lovely thought. The hope of it had pulled them through the hardest weeks of their lives. He knew now how short-sighted that hope had been, but terror and tension had kept his mind in check. The needs of the future had been sacrificed for the sake of the moment. But now, now this was the future, and the difficulties were only beginning.

So although he needn't glance back to the darkness behind him, the way ahead was not along an easy road. He could close his eyes now, draw deep breaths, and try to clear his head. They had simply left one form of the unknown to move on to shape another.

Raoul sighed, and realized he was rubbing at his wrists again in agitation. A new habit. The shackles of the Communard dungeon had left their marks. Though the bruising had mostly faded, the deep cuts from his futile struggles to escape had left angry lines in red and white – tattoos by which the young sailor could remember his great adventure for the rest of his life.

A flicker of memory at the sensation. Of waking alone in the dark, still in a drugged stupor. Of horror at the moment of realization that he was bound and alone. The memory of screaming, roaring, lashing out like a wild animal. The edges of the shackles tearing his skin, and of course not giving way in the least. The sensation of burning where the skin had been torn away, and the warmth of blood tickling its way down his forearms, when he had finally surrendered to reason.

Another memory. The eternity that followed, of hours or days, conscious or having fainted away, ending with the dazzling glow of a lantern, and an icy touch that stilled his hands. Turned a key in each lock. Raoul's impulse to lash out his captor had evaporated when he'd heard the low voice ask him to be still. As his eyes had adjusted, he had looked up, past the yellow eyes and the black silk mask which observed his wounds, to the figure at the edge of the lamplight beyond him. Christine watched him, her blue eyes in shadow but unwavering. Her face unreadable, but her bearing strong. She did not look away as Raoul hissed in pain while the masked man cleaned and bandaged his wrists.

Raoul had chosen to watch her watching him instead of looking into the eyes of the man who dressed his wounds. Christine was the only balm that would heal him.

Weeks later, that man was dead. Everything had changed. Erik had set them free that day, but he had never released them. The scars Raoul bore on his wrists were not the only mark of their lingering captivity.

Raoul opened his eyes and looked across at his companion. Christine sat perfectly still in her seat, her eyes open and staring, unfocused, at the night outside the little window. Her fair face and red-rimmed eyes were transformed in the moonlight to pallor and shadow. She had been weeping quietly off and on since they had left Paris, first by train to Lannion and now by coach to Perros-Guirec. So many times, Raoul had reached out for her; a hand hung in midair waiting for her to hold it and take his comfort. But each time he had reached for her, she had turned away, covered her face, and the tears had only flowed more freely. Each time, he had been forced to drop his hand back into his lap. Wringing his wrists again. Holding himself to keep from weeping too.

.

Finger-like shadows of overhanging branches moved across the small windows of the coach. Some scraped against the side of the vehicle, startling both its passengers. Christine looked alarmed, and gripped the edge of the window and stared out of it intensely. Raoul remained in his seat, regaining his calm.

"I asked them not to trim the branches by the gate," he explained, smiling apologetically. "No need to draw attention from the road that anyone's returned. At least… not just now."

Christine stared at him a moment, her expression blank, her eyes cold and far away. Raoul's gentle smile dissolved. He broke eye contact with her, passed a hand over his forehead, and sighed. She turned back again and continued to watch out the window as they pulled into the drive.

As the coach came to a halt in front of the house, Raoul took a moment to try to shake off his unease at Christine's chilly reaction – when she reacted to him at all – and to allow himself to be filled with relief at their successful arrival. As they stepped down from the coach, he looked up to the house and was immediately flooded with memories of better times, despite the ominous look of the sloped roof in the moonlight and the craggy stone walls casting strange shadows across the entrance. In the daylight, he knew, the warm pink granite from which so many of the older homes in the area had been built would be cheering, inviting. Even now, there were lights in the windows to welcome them, and the desperation of their flight to the Valerius home gave way to his fondness for the memories that he, Christine, and her father and adoptive family had made here.

The old house had been shut up since shortly after the death of Professor Valerius. Mama Valerius had been too heartsick and had lacked the will to return here in the summers without her husband or Papa Daae to accompany her. It had been too painful, and later she had become too ill.

Raoul had sent his most trusted personal servant, along with Christine's maid, ahead of them to prepare the house for their arrival. After they had disembarked from the coach, Raoul's manservant emerged from the house and greeted them, and began to help the coachman to unstrap and to carry in their luggage. Raoul and Christine had travelled lightly; most of their most treasured belongings had been sent ahead of them. After embarking on this journey themselves, they would not be returning to Paris.

The thought hung in Raoul's mind. He had known this whole time that their flight from the city would be one from which return would be impossible. But to have actually left it for the final time…

Their last weeks in Paris, in hiding, had been an ordeal nearly as painful for Raoul as his time in Erik's torture chamber. He and Christine had been secreted away in apartments secured for them by Mama Valerius. The threat of being utterly destitute, and possibly betrayed to the authorities, if his surviving family hadn't believed him innocent, had occupied Raoul's every thought and every hour. He had been paralyzed, unable to see or think beyond the moment.

Mama Valerius, bless her, had been their unquestionable and unquestioning saviour. Dictating with impressive authority from her sickbed, she had read all the daily news reports, and had also cautiously opened up communication with the younger of Raoul's older sisters, who still lived in Paris. Through a series of cautious exchanges, she had learned that his siblings believed with all their hearts that the beloved viscount had done no harm to his older brother. But the police were searching for him, and asking many questions.

They had even questioned Mama Valerius, whose acting skills would have been worthy of the stage. She had told Raoul after, laughing, how she had played the dotty old woman, delusional beyond sense, and told Inspector Faure that the angel of music must have carried the young pair off to heaven. Suitably unimpressed, the inspector had quickly written her off as a dead end.

Raoul and Christine had said goodbye to her with many tears and long embraces. However, unlike their goodbye to Paris, this was only meant to be temporary. When Mama was well enough, she told them, she would send a messenger ahead so they could arrange to receive her in Perros.

She had been an invalid for years, Raoul thought sadly, but she had also been sunk in melancholy since her husband's death, and hadn't had the will to get out of her chambers and rejoin the world. Maybe the pull of Brittany, the memories of their summers there, the open fields and the sun and the fresh salt air… Maybe…

He turned to Christine, knowing that these thoughts were no longer of Mama Valerius. She was standing in the stone drive before the house, but looking back up the road from which they had come. There was a strange, sad expectancy in her eyes that disturbed him. It was the look of an abandoned dog, pining beyond the point of hope that its master would return to it.

He reached out once more for her hand. "Christine." The name was spoken as gently as possible, barely a whisper in the warm spring night. Emboldened by the solid familiarity of their surroundings, this time he succeeded in grasping her hand in both of his. Even so, she startled at the unexpected contact, and looked down at his hands as though wondering why they were there. She turned to him with a questioning look.

He gestured up the road. "We weren't followed," he reassured her – and himself. "I asked the coachman to alert us of anyone on the road behind us. We're quite safe."

"Oh," she breathed. Her face showed no emotion – just wide eyes at his words as though he were speaking a language she only half understood. She opened her mouth to say something else, but it closed again, and she stole another look back up the road.

Raoul stepped in close to her. He brushed a few strands of blonde hair – white in the moonlight – back from her eyes, and placed his hands on her shoulders. She didn't resist, and he touched his forehead to hers. His voice was low, reassuring. "We're safe now, Christine. We are quite safe."

She grasped him back suddenly and buried her face into his shoulder. He stiffened at first, the contact a surprise, but softened quickly, as the surprise was pleasant. He stood and held her, quietly. Her whole body trembled, and her breaths were audible and quick as she fought to contain some overwhelming emotion. Whether it was grief or relief he could not tell. But he stayed holding her, feeling peace in the contact. Feeling home.

.

Inside the house, food had been prepared for them, but Christine, retreating again into grim distraction, had declined to eat anything and had gone straight to bed in her separate chamber. Raoul had felt an ache in his chest as he had watched her retreating form hurry up the stairs, glancing back over her shoulder at her own shadow following her. She was becoming exceedingly thin.

He had dined alone, chin in one hand as he had picked at his food with the other, too distracted himself to have much appetite.

Christine's constant distraction, and her utter detachment from everything and everyone around her, had to some degree, he knew, been constants since the death of her father. These had been interrupted and temporarily banished when she had thought her father's love had been sent back to her in the form of the angel. Even when that love had turned to terror, Christine had remained awakened – more of this world than she had been in years, even while she was under the influence of what had seemed to be otherworldly.

When Raoul had found himself being led back from the Communard dungeons; when he had been reunited with Christine in the Louis-Philippe room, and Erik had had them kiss before him as though he were the priest at their wedding… He had given them his blessing, and in the weeks that followed their release, Christine had stayed calm, happy even, engaged in Raoul's presence and delighted to be with him – without the frenzied, terrified delirium that had coloured every moment of their days "playing" at being engaged while Christine had worn the other man's ring on her finger. In the hardest moments that followed their release - of learning of Philippe's death, which had crushed Raoul, of going into hiding for the same reason – she had comforted him. And though she still had worn Erik's ring then, it was on a chain about her neck; her finger remained free for Raoul's ring to adorn when the time was right.

Erik's ring. If Raoul had only known how he would miss that ring.

Despite the trials that had followed their release, despite the hiding, and the furtive arrangements with the outside world, Christine's presence and their shared love had made life more than bearable. It had been the only thing Raoul had truly cared about in those bleak days.

It had all changed one morning, several weeks into this new and complicated life. He had dressed and come down to take breakfast in their Paris apartments, expecting to find Christine. She was gone.

Panicked at first, Raoul had searched the building for her. His panic had turned to despondent terror when he had finally found the torn piece of newspaper laid at his place at the table.

_"Erik is dead."_

He remembered gripping the back of the chair, white-knuckled. The blood draining from him as he had sunk to the floor. Holding his head in his hands.

_She was gone. Oh God. She had actually done it. Oh God…_

Raoul did not eat, sleep, or even leave the room until her return the next day. He remembered feeling as though a hand had burst through his chest, and had twisted and torn out his heart and all sense along with it.

She came back, yes. But if she had left Raoul as _his living bride_, as that monster had called her, that was not the Christine who had been returned to him.

Upon hearing her enter, Raoul had run to her to greet her return with a comforting embrace. Instead he had stopped short and staggered back. He had found himself looking into the vacant, sunken eyes of a woman who seemed not to know him anymore. Who, even with time, he would discover, retreated from his touch, and who rarely spoke except in strings of thoughts that were barely tied together.

When more days in one another's company had passed, and Christine's silence and coldness had only grown, he had felt his heart beginning to break all over again. Any effort to soothe her, or to encourage her to divulge any detail of what had happened when she had carried out her promise to the ghost, only made her retreat further, locking herself in her room and refusing food or company. When she did emerge and endure his presence, Raoul would look into her eyes and see only a vessel whose soul seemed to have fled. He had known it for certain, then: it was time to leave Paris and never look back.

For Erik was dead, and if something didn't change, it seemed only a matter of time before Christine would follow.

.

The room the servants had prepared for Raoul at the Perros house was M. Daae's old room. At first this had surprised him, and he worried that Christine might be upset at this arrangement. However, with his fiancée in her old room, and the Valerius' suite set aside for its owner once she arrived, there was little choice.

When Raoul retired for the evening, he was pleased to find that his man had sorted and put away most of his belongings. His clothes hung in the closet, and his personal items were arranged on and in the bureau and wash stand. Other items, still in their trunks and traveling cases, were piled neatly in one corner. Resting carefully on top of the stack, Raoul saw his old violin case. He smiled a bit ruefully, and walked across the room toward it. With care, he picked it up and ran his fingers over the surface of the smooth wood and leather case, well-oiled and immaculate. Time in the Navy hadn't exactly contributed to his practice of this instrument that he had spent so many summers studying under the guidance of this room's previous occupant.

He replaced the case in a secure position on top of the stack, extinguished the lamps for the night, and went to bed.

.

In a dead man's bed, Raoul de Chagny slept, and in his sleep, he dreamed.

He stood in the graveyard of the St. Jacques church at Perros-Guirec. He saw with relief that the scene was different than it had been during his last visit. The ground was free of snow, and new, pale green grass had emerged from the earth among the crumbling tombstones. Wild flowers whose buds had not yet opened were scattered among the blades of grass; some had pushed their way up through the gaping jaws and eye sockets of the rows of skulls stacked against the vestry. The sky was a curious shade of green and grey, darkening to slate at its height. The sun had not yet risen, and the half-light of pre-dawn cast a hazy glow over everything around him.

He looked down at his own clothing, and saw that he was dressed for a funeral. In one hand he carried a bouquet of white roses held together with a wide black ribbon.

He looked up and scanned the graveyard for a funeral party, but found that he was alone. After a moment's confusion, though, he saw it: a casket lay beside an open grave. The mound of earth beside it was still black and moist. He walked toward it, and as he drew closer he saw that the coffin was open. Terror at the sight froze him as he realized he had no idea for whose funeral he was the sole attendant.

He closed his eyes a moment, breathed deeply. He moved to the side of the coffin, not daring to look inside until he was too close to avoid it. And then he dared, and looked, and saw her.

Pale, delicate, peaceful: her blonde hair spilled across the white satin pillow as though she slept. Eyes he knew to be blue were closed and already slightly sunken.

He had failed.

Raoul sunk to his knees. The flowers spilled from his hand, the ribbon releasing them as they fell. He was tempted to touch her, to wake her, but revulsion at her death - terror of a corpse – prevented him. And he was ashamed. Collapsed on the ground beside the casket, he held his head in his hands and moaned – first in words of protest, but the moan distilled into the sound of pure grief, needing no other language to express its depth.

The moan seemed to echo. The sound from Raoul ceased in his shock, but the moan continued without him and gradually rose in pitch. He realized it was a low note played across the strings of a violin. It drew out for what seemed to be an impossibly long time before slowly, teasingly turning to melody. The emotional play, the showmanship of drawing out the timing to raise the listener's suspense: Raoul recognized the style of the player, and more chillingly to him, also the piece he played.

Before he raised his head from his hands to look, he knew it was Christine's father who played by her would-be grave The Resurrection of Lazarus.

As he dared remove his hands from his eyes and look up to find him, he first saw the shadow of the figure stretched across the ground, long in the light of the sun just now rising. The shapes of the thin, delicate fingers manipulating the instrument seemed to reach out towards Raoul, nearly touching him. The shadow wore a wide-brimmed felt hat and a cloak. Raoul shivered as he continued to raise his eyes past the shadow to the figure itself. The sun was dazzling behind him as it freed itself from the horizon, and for a moment Raoul could only see the man himself as another shadow against the light. But as his eyes adjusted, he recognized the close-cropped chestnut beard, the angular nose and bright blue eyes of his former teacher and friend.

Papa Daae was playing to his dead daughter.

Raoul stayed seated on the ground, watching and listening, entranced by the music and enchanted by the sight of the impossible, this dead man in living flesh before him. His heart was filled with despair and ecstacy at once. Another sound then filled it with terror until it seemed to overflow. He could not move, could not even turn his eyes as the sound came from the wooden box beside him. His own veins seemed to burn, blood replaced by something caustic. Paralyzing him completely.

Another low moan had begun, but this time it was no violin. It began as just a puff of air, the sound like an ancient door being unsealed and its cobwebs disturbed. From the corner of his eye – he dared not look, even if he could have – he saw the shape rise in the coffin, its hollow eyes open, staring, mouth agape making its empty noise. The caustic feeling in his veins turned to lye. His terror was burning him from the inside.

The sound beside him gained volume and became a low voice, rising slowly to the sound of a woman's gasp. Of one just awakened, with morning's first yawn. The sound brightened, became musical. The body was now kneeling erect in the foot of the coffin, its arms reaching out towards the violinist. It began to sing to the melody, beautiful wordless sounds like bird song.

Raoul dared to look as it finally stood up and stepped free of the coffin. She was alive! Alive, with the blush of blood in her cheeks, her eyes bright and clear as they caught the morning light. The flowers in among the graves and skulls were opening to the song and daylight as she strode towards the man in the cloak whose playing was drawing her.

Raoul was overcome. He had to join them, embrace them. He ached just to touch them both again. How thankful he was for another chance to tell them the depth of his love.

Christine reached her father with arms extended, tears of joy on her cheeks. She knelt before him, and grasped him about the knees, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her cheek to him. So peaceful, happy. So complete in her love for her father and that beautiful violin. The father turned to her, bending down a little to see his daughter as he played, the rising sun once more obscuring his features.

Regaining his strength, his heart now nearly bursting with elation, Raoul climbed to his feet and approached them, a hand held out ready to extend it in love and thanks.

As he drew close, the bow slid to a stop over the strings. The violinist, whose whole aspect was inclined towards Christine in her rapture, straightened his shoulders, raised his head, and turned to face the young man.

Raoul stopped where he stood, his reaching hand once more frozen in mid air. He stared back into yellow eyes sunken into a face of decay. The noseless hole, the receded lips over that impossible grin.

Erik smiled at him - Christine still grasped about his waist and weeping her tears of joy - and with a floating, elegant gesture of those skeletal hands, he raised the bow from the strings and held the length of it out, pointing it straight to Raoul.

The young man snapped awake, in sheets soaked with sweat despite the chill in the spring night's air. He lay on his back, staring wide-eyed at the shadows cast by the moon on the ceiling, and took stock of his present state. He felt… no lingering terror. No terror at all, he was astonished to realize. Awakened from that… _that_… he felt immense calm. He felt reassured – certain - that somehow it was going to be all right.

Still, when he closed his eyes to return to sleep, the image was there again, burned into his memory like a photographic plate: the skeletal grin, the bony hand holding the bow, and the yellow eyes staring down it at him as one looks along the barrel of a gun.


End file.
